A Fable

by William Faulkner

  No, it would not be much longer now, and for an instant he thought, toyed with the idea, of confounding corruption with corruption: using the equivalent of the check which in New York he had offered to write, to combat the reward, and put that away because that would fail too: not that corrupting corruption would merely spread corruption that much further, but because the idea merely created an image which even a poet must regard as only a poet’s fantastic whimsy: Mammon’s David ringing for a moment anyway Mammon’s Goliath’s brazen invincible unregenerate skull. It was not long now, the end was actually in sight when the course, the run (as if it too knew that this was near the end) turned sharply back south and east across Missouri and into the closing V where the St Francis river entered the Mississippi, haunted still by the ghosts of the old bank-and-railroad bandits who had refuged there; then over, finished, done: an afternoon, a little lost branch-line county seat with a fairgrounds and a rail-less half-mile track, the pursuers crossing the infield in the van of a growing crowd of local people, town and swamp and farm, all men, silent, watching, not crowding them at all yet: just watching; and now for the first time they laid eyes on the thief whom they had pursued now for almost fifteen months: the foreigner, the Englishman leaning in the doorless frame of the fallen stable, the butt of the still-warm pistol protruding from the waistband of his filthy jodhpurs, and behind him the body of the horse shot neatly once through the star on its forehead and beyond the horse the Roman senator’s head and the brushed worn frock coat of the old Negro preacher, and beyond him in turn, in deeper shadow still, the still white eyeballs of the child; and that night in the jail cell the ex-deputy (still a lawyer even though the prisoner violently and obscenely repudiated him) said:

  ‘I would have done it too of course. But tell me why——No, I know why. I know the reason. I know it’s true: I just want to hear you say it, hear both of us say it so I’ll know it’s real’——already—or still—speaking even through the other’s single vicious obscene contemptuous epithet: ‘You could have surrendered the horse at any time and it could have stayed alive, but that was not it: not just to keep it alive, anymore than for the few thousands or the few hundred thousands that people will always be convinced you won on it’——stopping then and even waiting, or anyway watching, exultant and calm while the prisoner cursed, not toward him nor even just at him, but him, the ex-deputy, steadily and for perhaps a full minute, with harsh and obscene unimagination, then the ex-deputy speaking again, rapid and peaceful and soothing: ‘All right, all right. The reason was so that it could run, keep on running, keep on losing races at least, finish races at least even if it did have to run them on three legs, did run them on three legs because it was a giant and didn’t need even three legs to run them on but only one with a hoof at the end to qualify as a horse. While they would have taken it back to the Kentucky farm and shut it up in a whorehouse where it wouldn’t need any legs at all, not even a sling suspended from a travelling crane geared by machinery to the rhythm of ejaculation, since a skillful pander with a tin cup and a rubber glove’——exultant and quite calm, murmuring: ‘Fathering colts forever more; they would have used its ballocks to geld its heart with for the rest of its life, except that you saved it because any man can be a father, but only the best, the brave——’ and left in the middle of the spent dull repetitive cursing and from New Orleans the next morning sent back the best lawyer which even he, with all the vast scope of his family’s political affiliations and his own semi-professional and social ones, could find—a lawyer whose like the little lost Missouri town had probably never seen before, nor anyone else for that matter, as having come four hundred miles to defend a nameless foreign horsethief—telling the lawyer what he had seen there: the curious, watching attitude of the town——

  ‘A mob,’ the lawyer said, with a sort of unction almost. ‘It’s a long time since I have coped with a mob.’

  ‘No no,’ the client said quickly. ‘They are just watching, waiting for something, I didn’t have time to find out what.’

  And the lawyer saw that too. He found more than that: arriving on the second morning after an all-night drive in his private chauffeured limousine, and within thirty minutes was on the telephone back to his client in New Orleans, because the man he had come to defend was gone, vanished, not escaped from the jail but freed from it, the lawyer sitting at the telephone where he could look out into the quiet square almost empty of movement, from which nobody watched him now nor for that matter had ever actually looked at him, but where he was conscious of them—not so much the dour, slow-speaking, half-western half-southern faces, but of the waiting, the attention.

  And not only the white man, the two Negroes were gone too, the lawyer on the New Orleans telephone again that evening, not because it had taken him this long to learn these meagre details, but simply because he realised now that this was all he was going to find out here, by inquiry or purchase or just by simple listening, no matter how much longer he stayed: how the two Negroes had never reached the jail at all but had vanished apparently into thin air somewhere between it and the courthouse, where the ex-deputy’s Federal successor had formally relinquished the three prisoners to the local sheriff; only the white man ever to reach the jail, because the ex-deputy had seen him there, and he gone too now, not even freed so much as just vanished, the lawyer discovering five minutes after his arrival that there was no prisoner, and at the end of thirty no felon, and by mid-afternoon no crime even, the body of the horse having vanished too sometime during that first night, and nobody had moved it nor seen anyone moving it nor heard of anyone who might have moved it or in fact even knew that it was missing.

  But the pursuit had long ago learned about all there was to know about those two weeks in the eastern Tennessee valley last fall, and the ex-deputy had briefed the lawyer, and so to the lawyer there was no mystery about it; he had already divined the solution: there would be Masons in Missouri too—an opinion which the client in New Orleans didn’t even bother to ignore, let alone acknowledge, not the ex-deputy’s but the poet’s voice actually babbling at his end of the wire while the lawyer was still talking:

  ‘About the money,’ the lawyer said. ‘They searched him, of course——’

  ‘All right, all right,’ the ex-deputy said. —right perhaps, justice certainly, might not have prevailed, but something more important had——

  ‘He had only ninety-four dollars and a few cents,’ the lawyer said.

  ‘The old Negro has got the rest of it in the tail of that frock-coat,’ the ex-deputy said.——truth, love, sacrifice, and something else even more important than they: some bond between or from man to his brother man stronger than even the golden shackles which coopered precariously his ramshackle earth——

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ the lawyer said. ‘Of course that’s where the money is. Why the hell I didn’t——Hush, and listen to me a minute. There’s nothing more I can do here, so I’m coming back to town as soon as they unlock the garage in the morning and I can get my car. But you are already on the scene, you can do it quicker than I can by telephone from here. Get in touch with your people and get notices spread up and down the valley as quick as you can—placards, descriptions of all three of them——’

  ‘No,’ the ex-deputy said. ‘You must stay there. If anything further comes out of the charge, it will have to originate there. You must be there to protect him.’

  ‘The only one who will need protection here is the first man who tries to lay a hand on the man who earned as much money as they believe he did, with nothing but his bare hands and a three-legged horse,’ the lawyer said. ‘He’s a fool. If he had stayed here, he could have had the sheriff’s badge without even running for it. But I can do everything necessary by telephone from my office until we catch them.’

  ‘I said from the first that you didn’t understand,’ the ex-deputy said. ‘No: that you still did not believe me, even after I tried to tell you. I dont want to find him—them. I had my turn at bat, and
struck out. You stay there. That’s what you are for,’ the ex-deputy said, and hung up. Though still the lawyer didn’t move, his end of the connection still open, the smoke from his cigar standing like a balanced pencil on a carven hand until the other New Orleans number answered and he spoke to his confidential clerk, describing the two Negroes, rapid and explicit and succinct:

  ‘Cover all the river towns from St Louis to Basin Street. Watch the cabin or stable or whatever it is in Lexington, of course; if he doesn’t go back home himself, he might try to send the child back.’

  ‘You’re in the middle of a pretty good place to look for him now,’ the clerk said. ‘If the sheriff there wont——’

  ‘Listen to me,’ the lawyer said. ‘Listen carefully. He must not reappear here under any condition. He must not be found at all until he can be picked up for something like vagrancy in some city big enough for nobody to know who he is, or care. Under no condition must he come into the clutches of any local officers in any town or hamlet small enough even to have heard of that three-legged horse, let alone seen it. Do you understand?’

  A moment: then the clerk: ‘So they really did win that much money.’

  ‘Do as I tell you,’ the lawyer said.

  ‘Of course,’ the clerk said. ‘Only you’re too late. The owner of the horse has already beat you. The police here have had that notice ever since yesterday, and I imagine the police everywhere have it by now—description, reward and all. They even know where the money is: in the tail-pocket of that preacher’s coat the nigger wears. It’s too bad every house he passes dont have a wireless, like ships do. Then he would know how valuable he is, and he would have something to trade with you on.’

  ‘Do as I tell you,’ the lawyer said; that was the second day; then the third day and the lawyer had established his headquarters or post of command in the judge’s chambers next the courtroom in the courthouse, not by the consent or even acquiescence of the judge who was a circuit judge and merely followed the itinerary of his court and did not live in the town and was not even consulted, nor by the acquiescence of the town either but by its will, so that it did not even matter whether the judge was a Mason too or not; and in the barbershop that day the lawyer saw last night’s St Louis paper bearing something which even purported to be a photograph of the old Negro, with the usual description and even a guess at the amount of money in the tail of the frock-coat, the barber, busy with another client, having apparently glanced at least once at the lawyer where he stood looking at the paper, because the barber said, ‘That many folks hunting for him ought to find him,’ then silence and then a voice from the other end of the shop, speaking to nothing and no one and with no inflection: ‘Several thousand dollars.’

  Then the fourth day, when the Department of Justice investigator and the one from the sheriff’s bonding company arrived (the first St Louis reporter had reached the scene one train ahead of the U.P. man from Little Rock) and from his high small quiet borrowed window the lawyer watched the two strangers and the sheriff and the two men who would be the sheriff’s local bondsmen, cross the square not to the front door of the bank but around to the discreet side one which led directly to the president’s office; five minutes there, then out again, the two strangers stopping while the sheriff and the two local men scattered briskly and vanished, the two strangers looking after them until the Federal man removed his hat and seemed to be studying the inside of it for a moment, a second. Then he turned briskly, leaving the bonding company’s man still looking out across the square, and crossed to the hotel and entered it, moving briskly now, and reappeared with his strapped bag and sat down on the bench opposite the bus stop; and then the bonding company’s man moved too and crossed to the hotel and reappeared with his bag.

  Then the fifth day and the sixth and even the two reporters had returned to where they came from and there remained in the town no stranger save the lawyer; nor was he a stranger anymore now, though he was never to know by what means the town had learned or divined that he was there not to prosecute but to shield; and at times during that idleness and waiting, he would imagine, envision himself actually in court with the man whom he had not only no expectation but even intention, of ever seeing at all—a picture of himself not engaged in just one more monotonous legal victory, but as a—perhaps the—figure in a pageant which in reality would be an historical commemoration, in fact, even more than that: the affirmation of a creed, a belief, the declaration of an undying faith, the postulation of an invincible way of life: the loud strong voice of America itself out of the westward roar of the tremendous and battered yet indomitably virgin continent, where nothing save the vast unmoral sky limited what a man could try to do, nor even the sky limit his success and the adulation of his fellow man; even the defence he would employ would be in the old fine strong American tradition of rapine, its working precedent having been already established in this very—or anyway approximate—land by an older and more successful thief than any English groom or Negro preacher: John Murrell himself, himself his own attorney: the rape was not a theft but merely a misdemeanor, since the placard offering the reward before the horse’s demise had constituted a legal power of attorney authorising any man’s hand to the body of the horse, and its violation had been a simple breach of trust, the burden of the proof of which lay with the pursuers since they would have to prove that the man had not been trying simply to find the owner and restore him his property all the time.

  This, out of daydream’s idle unexpectation, because the lawyer did not really expect ever to see either of them since the owner or the Federal Government would indubitably catch them first, right up to the morning of the seventh day when there was a knock at the jail’s kitchen door—a knock not much louder than audibility, yet quite firm; and, firm, yet not at all peremptory: just polite, courteous and firm: a knock not often heard at the back door of a small Missouri jail, nor even quite at the back door of an Arkansas or Louisiana or Mississippi plantation house, where it might sooner have been at home, the turnkey’s wife wiping her hands on her apron as she turned from the sink and opened the door on a middleageless Negro man in a worn brushed frock-coat and carrying a napless tophat, whom she did not recognise because she had not expected to see him there, possibly because he was alone, the boy, the child still standing five minutes later just inside the mouth of the alley beside the jail, where neither he nor the old one gave any sign of recognition whatever, although his grandfather—handcuffed now to the turnkey—actually brushed him in passing. But her husband recognised him at once, not by the face, he scarcely glanced at that, but by the coat: the worn dusty broadcloth garment which—not the man but the coat, and not even the whole coat but the elbow-deep, suitcase-roomy tails of it—the county and state police of five contiguous commonwealths had been blocking roads and searching farm wagons and automobiles and freight trains and the Jim Crow cars of passenger ones, and depot lavatories, charging in pairs and threes with shotguns and drawn pistols through the pool halls and burial associations and the kitchens and bedrooms of Negro tenements for sixty-five hours now, trying to find. As did the town too: the turnkey and his shackled prize had scarcely left the jail before they began to gather behind them a growing tail of men and youths and small boys like that of a rising kite, which in the street leading to the square the turnkey could still tell himself that he was leading, and which while crossing the square toward the courthouse he even still looked like he was, walking faster and faster, almost dragging the prisoner at the other end of the chain joining them, until at last he broke and even took one step actually running before he stopped and turned to face the pressing crowd, drawing the pistol from its holster all in one blind motion like the hopeless and furious repudiation of the boy turning, once more whole, stainless and absolved, to hurl his toy pistol into the very face of the charging elephant, victim no more of terror but of pride, and cried in a thin forlorn voice which itself was like the manless voice of a boy: